Monthly Archives: October 2016

What happens when you take a good horror theme (the Ouija Board), pair it with some really bad actors and actresses and an oh-so lame plot, filter it all through a found-footage format, and add a 15 minute backstory movie-within-your-movie to try to allow it all to make sense? Bad Horror!

In this Bad Horror movie, five friends/acquaintances decide to videotape their sessions with a Ouija Board. They review the important rules of using such a dangerous device, then promptly start being their own idiotic selves by arguing, flirting, sassing, mm-hmming (this from a stereotyped African-American girl) throughout the movie as one by one they are confronted with several spirits they have summoned from the board, all of which have their own agendas, and as one by one they ignore the list of rules for safely using the Board.

Now, in order for any of the events to actually make sense, the movie also features an annoying mini movie, to shed light on these spirits and why they are interested in these particular friends and this particular house. This mini movie is somehow based on one of the guys’ re-imaginings while reading some old newspaper articles. How this mental movie got into a found-footage movie, who knows. But really, by this point, who cares. I say, save yourself the ninety-three minutes and watch a classic Scooby Doo episode instead.

Ever watch a movie that goes this way and that and after it’s over, you’re not quite sure what you just saw? This is that kind of movie. I’m still trying to decide how to categorize it.

10 Cloverfield Lane starts off as a tense yet quiet thriller-slash-mystery movie. Michelle is a young woman who has left her fiance one night, and is hit while driving. She awakens in an underground bunker chained to a cement block wall. So the movie starts with this kidnapped-girl vibe, but we soon learn that her captor Howard (played, thankfully, by a low-key John Goodman) believes he has saved her, and his neighbor Emmett, from an apocalyptic-type event. As Michelle questions the veracity of this claim, events unfold which also lead her to believe Howard. Soon, clues present themselves which support one theory after another, one character, then another, with the plot twisting and turning in various ways. The final twenty minutes are unpredictable at best and head-scratching at worst, leading me to finish the movie feeling part confused, part disappointed, and part wowed. All-in-all, not a bad movie, just maybe not a great one either.